7/27/2005 @ 12:30AM

Chevrolet Suburban Vs. Ford Excursion

You would think the Hummer would be the perennial icon of excessive SUVs.

Political leaders (well, not Arnold Schwarzenegger) speak out against it. The Sierra Club has a satirical Web site, Hummerdinger.com, that features such headlines as “EPA Announces New Model-Year Fuel Economy: The Good, The Bad and The Hummer.”

But this year, General Motors‘ Hummer subsidiary added the smaller and more fuel-efficient H3 to its lineup. The H3 has a hardly profligate five-cylinder engine; certain Volvos come with similar power plantsor even bigger ones.

The Hummer brand is no longer the poster-child for enormous, decadent vehicles. That distinction now goes to Ford Motor‘s Excursion SUV, which is almost 20 feet long and, when equipped with its most powerful engine option, weighs almost 8,000 lbs.

Chevrolet‘s Suburban is also a behemoth. The SUVs have similar pricing, and their most powerful engines are both V8s with identical displacements and horsepower. Why, then, has the Excursion managed to match only 17% of the Suburban’s U.S. sales this year?

One reason is that Ford is phasing the Excursion out of production. In a recent phone interview, a Ford spokesman said the company will not release a 2006 model. Supplier sources familiar with the automaker’s plans say Ford may replace the Excursion in the future with a longer version of its next-generation Expedition SUV. The Ford spokesman declined to comment on these reports.

But the Excursion has never really been competitive with the Suburban, and Ford talked about killing it for a long time. The Suburban has always been more refined. Get it fully loaded and it approximates a luxury vehicle. More importantly, its mechanical underpinnings are evolved from GM’s regular pickup chassis, whereas the Excursion is closer to a commercial vehicle, thanks to its commonality with Ford’s Super Duty truck architecture. To drive an Excursion is to know how settlers felt in their conestogas.

Ford is planning an overhaul of its Super Duty pickups for model-year 2007, according to supplier sources (the automaker has declined to verify these plans), and to derive another Excursion from the heavy-duty architecture makes no financial sense, as the SUV trades in such low volumes.

But for model-year 2005, the Excursion costs Ford nothing to build. It stayed in production this year because its manufacturing investment was paid off and it could borrow cosmetic parts created by a recent Super Duty face-lift. Ford is on pace to sell 15,000 Excursions in the U.S. this year with no significant marketing.

The company could get better profit margins with an extended Expedition (which some sources are calling the “Expedition Max”). Such a vehicle has a potentially larger market due to the Expedition’s name recognition; so far this year, Ford has sold eight times as many Expeditions as Excursions in America.

Comparison shoppers ordinarily find the Suburban a more reasonable full-size SUV than the Excursion. The Excursion is not just bigger; many buyers can’t fit it in a garageand we’re talking about a regular-sized, suburban home garage, not a city garage.

The Excursion is also more single-purposethat purpose being towing, at which the vehicle excels. The Suburban, because it is not so focused on towing, is more refined when it comes to steering and riding comfort. It is not simply a pickup with an SUV body; its frame is unique to the vehicle and its suspension is sophisticated.

NOTE: The information in the slide show about the Suburban’s engine comes from General Motors’ media Web site. At press time, the company had not returned repeated e-mail requests for verification of the information.